Maurice Bennett

Maurice "Toastman" Bennett (25 April 1957 – 6 June 2016) was a New Zealand artist who used toast as an artistic medium. Beginning in 2000, his billboard-sized toast mosaic images of well-known personalities including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jonah Lomu, the Mona Lisa, Dame Edna and Barack Obama, were exhibited widely and received a great deal of media interest in New Zealand and internationally. From 2000 to 2005 he held the world record for the largest toast portrait, and he also held the world record for the largest portrait made out of candy for a portrait of Eminem in M&M's. Bennett developed cancer in 2000, shortly after he began experimenting with toast artworks, and although given a prognosis of 5 years to live, survived for 16 years. In addition to his artwork he and his wife ran a supermarket and a brewery in Wellington, until he became a full-time artist in 2009. He died at his home in Island Bay, Wellington, at age 59. Early life and career Bennett was born on 25 April 1957 in Paeroa, New Zealand. He attended high school in Whakatane, completed a certificate in civil engineering at Auckland Technical Institute and began (but did not complete) a bachelor of architecture at Auckland University. He married his wife Carolyn in 1987, having met her while working at a supermarket, and they had two daughters. Outside of his artwork, he and his wife ran a New World supermarket in Island Bay, Wellington, and (from 2004) a brewing company, and he became a fulltime artist in 2009. He was a collector of New Zealand ceramics, and curated an exhibition of ceramics called Tectonic Clay at a Wellington gallery in 2014. Bennett's early artwork was conventional painting, sculpture and installation art. The 1998 New Zealand Fringe Festival featured his exhibition Burning Desire, in which he set fire to a pile of miscellaneous objects and exhibited the remains. He received the festival's "off-the-edge" award for this work. He began working in toast in 1999, experimenting first with a trial 940-slice piece outside his supermarket. He has said he was inspired to make toast artworks during a family barbecue, and after seeing a picture in a magazine by Chuck Close that on first glance looked like it was made out of pieces of toast.